Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
~Alistair Cooke

If only Hitler and Mussolini could have a good game of bowls once a week at Geneva, I feel that Europe would not be as troubled as it is.
~R.G. Briscow

The difference between the old ballplayer and the new ballplayer is the jersey. The old ballplayer cared about the name on the front. The new ballplayer cares about the name on the back.
~Steve Garvey

Sports is human life in microcosm.
~Howard Cosell

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.
~Blaise Pascal

The fewer rules a coach has, the fewer rules there are for players to break.
~John Madden

I don't believe professional athletes should be role models. I believe parents should be role models.... It's not like it was when I was growing up. My mom and my grandmother told me how it was going to be. If I didn't like it, they said, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out." Parents have to take better control.
~Charles Barkley

I think my favorite sport in the Olympics is the one in which you make your way through the snow, you stop, you shoot a gun, and then you continue on. In most of the world, it is known as the biathlon, except in New York City, where it is known as winter.
~Michael Ventre, L.A. Daily News

We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time.
~Vince Lombardi

The trouble with referees is that they just don't care which side wins.
~Tom Canterbury

When we played, World Series checks meant something. Now all they do is screw up your taxes.
~Don Drysdale, 1978

With the money I'm making, I should be playing two positions.
~Pete Rose, 1977

Andre Dawson has a bruised knee and is listed as day-to-day. Aren't we all?
~Vin Scully

I don't know. I never smoked AstroTurf.
~Tug McGraw, when asked if he preferred grass or AstroTurf, April 1974

To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.
~Jack Handey

Prize fighters can sometimes read and write when they start - but they can't when they finish.
~Martin H. Fischer

October is not only a beautiful month but marks the precious yet fleeting overlap of hockey, baseball, basketball, and football.
~Jason Love

I would have thought that the knowledge that you are going to be leapt upon by half-a-dozen congratulatory, but sweaty team-mates would be inducement not to score a goal.
~Arthur Marshall

A player who conjugates a verb in the first person singular cannot be part of the squad, he has to conjugate the verb in the first person plural. We. We want to conquer. We are going to conquer. Using the word "I" when you're in a group makes things complicated.
~Wanderley Luxemburgo, 1999

One day of practice is like one day of clean living. It doesn't do you any good.
~Abe Lemmons

The more you sweat in practice, the less you bleed in battle.
~Author Unknown

I wanted to have a career in sports when I was young, but I had to give it up. I'm only six feet tall, so I couldn't play basketball. I'm only 190 pounds, so I couldn't play football. And I have 20-20 vision, so I couldn't be a referee.
~Jay Leno

To think of playing cricket for hard cash! Money and gentility would ruin any pastime under the sun.
~Mary Russell Mitford, 1823

It is all very well to say that a man should play for the pure love of the game. Perhaps he ought, but to the working man it is impossible.
~J.J. Bentley

I know we're meant to be these hard-headed, money-obsessed professionals but we're still little boys at heart. Just ask our wives.
~Rob Lee, 1998

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. Shorn of the game's aesthetic pleasures, or the comfort of a crowd that feels the same way as you, or the sense of security that you get when you see that your defenders and goalkeeper are more or less where they should be, all that is left is naked fear.
~Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch, 1992

Playing polo is like trying to play golf during an earthquake.
~Sylvester Stallone, 1990

Professional wrestling's most mysterious hold is on its audience.
~Luke Neely, 1953

As a manager, you always have a gun to your head. It's a question of whether there is a bullet in the barrel.
~Kevin Keegan, 1995

The breakfast of champions is not cereal, it's the opposition.
~Nick Seitz

We are inclined that if we watch a football game or baseball game, we have taken part in it.
~John F. Kennedy, 1961

Most people are in a factory from nine till five. Their job may be to turn out 263 little circles. At the end of the week they're three short and somebody has a go at them. On Saturday afternoons they deserve something to go and shout about.
~Rodney Marsh, 1969

I don't think the discus will ever attract any interest until they let us start throwing them at one another.
~Al Oerter

The umpire... is like the geyser in the bathroom; we cannot do without it, yet we notice it only when it is out of order.
~Neville Cardus

Most games are lost, not won.
~Casey Stengel

It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls.
~George Bernard Shaw

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
~H.L. Mencken

The more I practice, the luckier I get.
~Jerry Barber, about golf

Baseball and football are very different games. In a way, both of them are easy. Football is easy if you're crazy as hell. Baseball is easy if you've got patience. They'd both be easier for me if I were a little more crazy - and a little more patient.
~Bo Jackson

There isn't a single professional sports season now that doesn't go on at least a month too long. Baseball starts in football weather, and football in baseball weather, and basketball overlaps them both.
~James Reston

Sport is where an entire life can be compressed into a few hours, where the emotions of a lifetime can be felt on an acre or two of ground, where a person can suffer and die and rise again on six miles of trails through a New York City park. Sport is a theater where sinner can turn saint and a common man become an uncommon hero, where the past and the future can fuse with the present. Sport is singularly able to give us peak experiences where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.
~George A. Sheehan

When it comes to sports I am not particularly interested. Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.
~Fran Lebowitz

I cannot for the life of me see why the umpires, the only two people on a cricket field who are not going to get grass stains on their knees, are the only two people allowed to wear dark trousers.
~Katharine Whitehorn

Many continentals think life is a game; the English think cricket is a game.
~George Mikes, How to Be an Alien, 1946

Cricket - a game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of eternity.
~Lord Mancroft

Oh God, if there be cricket in heaven, let there also be rain.
~Alec Douglas Home

Cricket is baseball on valium.
~Robin Williams

Life is simply a cricket match, with temptation as the bowler.
~Author Unknown

You're playing worse every day and right now you're playing like the middle of next week.

The ball is man's most disastrous invention, not excluding the wheel.
~Robert Morley, 1965

Every day you guys look worse and worse. And today you played like tomorrow.
~John Mariucci

The Russians have a weapon that can wipe out two hundred eighty thousand Americans. That puts them exactly ten years behind Howard Cosell.
~Red Smith

Motor racing's less of a sport these days than a commercial break doing 150 mph.
~Peter Dunne, 1992

Sport is a preserver of health.
~Hippocrates

It is not how big you are, it's how big you play.
~Author Unknown

A tough day at the office is even tougher when your office contains spectator seating.
~Nik Posa

The key is not the "will to win" - everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.
~Bobby Knight

You have to be able to center yourself, to let all of your emotions go. Don't ever forget that you play with your soul as well as your body.
~Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

All a manager has to do is keep eleven players happy - the eleven in the reserves. The first team are happy because they are in the first team.
~Rodney Marsh, 1979

Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see - not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.
~Lewis H. Lapham, Money and Class in America, 1988

[T]he finish line is sometimes merely the symbol of victory. All sorts of personal triumphs take place before that point, and the outcome of the race may actually be decided long before the end.
~Laurence Malone

It's not whether you win or lose - but whether I win or lose.
~Sandy Lyle

There's more to boxing than hitting. There's not getting hit, for instance.
~George Foreman

I'm fanatical about sport: there seems to me something almost religious about the fact that human beings can organise play, the spirit of play.
~Simon Gray, 1995

Squash is boxing with racquets.
~Jonah Barrington

Crystallizing my feelings about the game, I find that squash is less frustrating than golf, less fickle than tennis. It is easier than badminton, cheaper than polo. It is better exercise than bowls, quicker than cricket, less boring than jogging, drier than swimming, safer than hang gliding.
~John Hopkins, Squash: A Joyful Game, 1980

My only feeling about superstition is that it's unlucky to be behind at the end of the game.
~Duffy Daugherty

If I lose at play, I blaspheme; if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So, God is always the loser.
~John Donne, 1623

American professional athletes are bilingual; they speak English and profanity.
~Gordie Howe, 1975

We have forty-four defenses for him, but he has forty-five ways to score.
~Al Attles, on Nate Archibald

Sports are too much with us. Late and soon, sitting and watching - mostly watching on television - we lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention as more and more closing rallies and crucial putts and late field goals and final playoffs and sudden deaths and world records and world championships unreel themselves ceaselessly before our half-lidded eyes.
~Roger Angell

Fans are the only ones who really care. There are no free-agent fans.
~Dick Young

When cerebral processes enter into sports, you start screwing up. It's like the Constitution, which says separate church and state. You have to separate mind and body.
~Bill Lee

These are my new shoes. They're good shoes. They won't make you rich like me, they won't make you rebound like me, they definitely won't make you handsome like me. They'll only make you have shoes like me. That's it.
~From a Charles Barkley commercial for basketball shoes, 1993

Just give me 25 guys on the last year of their contracts; I'll win a pennant every year.
~Sparky Anderson

Finish last in your league and they call you Idiot. Finish last in medical school and they call you Doctor.
~Abe Lemons

I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.
~Andrew Dickson White

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting... there are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.
~George Orwell

We can't win at home and we can't win on the road. My problem as general manager is I can't think of another place to play.
~Pat Williams